Three Words Back...

With My Head In The Clouds

Warning: This post is not interesting.  Not in the least.  It's merely a time-killer while I wait to board my flight to Syracuse.  This is my second flight of the day and my fourth in the last 30 hours.  I'm all over the friendly skies of the northeast this week.  So anyway, my earlier flight was a little puddle-jumper plane that flew through every cloud between Baltimore and New York La Guardia Airport.  Every time I fly I think about how cool it is that there are such a thing as clouds, and vow to learn more about them.  Here's the wikipedia entry, which I may or may not get around to reading when I land.  But for now, I need to shut this down and get ready to board - I'm one of the rock starts in Zone 1 that get to sit in their tiny airline seats longer than the other folks.

YouTube Tuesdays: A Game of Horseshoooooooes

You cannot go wrong with this song.  You just can't.

Meditations In An Emergency

Tonight was the premiere of the second season of AMC's Mad Men (great show), and one short scene led me to a pretty cool poem.  One of the central characters is eating lunch in a bar and strikes up a conversation with the barfly to his right, who's intently reading Meditations In An Emergency by Frank O'Hara.  The show, set in the early 1960's, is great about little details of the era, so I decided to google the book.  Turns out it's a book of selected poetry, and the following is a short part of the poem by the same name:

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time;
they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and
disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away.
Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me
restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them
still. If only i had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I
would stay at home and do something. It's not that I'm
curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it's my duty to be
attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the
earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can
spare myself little sleep.

Thank you once again, internet, for putting the world at our fingertips.

It Never Slows Down

This has been one very dizzy week.  Wednesday was my one day off, and it was spent helping out a different branch.  Thursday I was up at 4:00, at work by 5:30, and got home 14 hours later.  Today was our Grand Opening and I'm glad this one is in the books.  Next week I travel to Baltimore and Virginia on Tuesday, fly back to New York on Wednesday, drive across the state for a Counting Crows concert on Thursday, and all that before starting the whole circus up again at a new branch the following Monday.  I also had a few of the blanks filled in for how I'll be spending this fall and possibly next year....so on top of being physically beat my head is spinning with how the rest of 2008 will play out.

In other news, I still haven't seen the new Batman.  Maybe tomorrow.

Oh, and who is the idiot that invented the ads that take up an entire corner of the screen while I'm watching TV?  All the networks do it now, and it drives me crazy.

Premiering YouTube Tuesdays

New feature here on the site: YouTube Tuesdays.  Because let's face it, if you're reading this then you probably have time to kill.  Enjoy.

It Was Bound To Happen Sooner or Later

Eleven months on the road, and it finally happened.  Yesterday I went to get a soda from the vending machine down the hall and I heard quite a few "Yes"s and "Ooohhh"s coming from one of the rooms, not to mention assorted moans, grunts, and uh...."labored breathing."

So yeah, apparently Room 913 definitely had quite a Sunday afternoon.  Glad I'm not sharing a wall with them.

Wishful Thinking...

Okay readers, you've got a Sunday to do with whatever you like.  How do you like to spend the day?

As for me, my ideal Sunday is early morning coffee with a friend or two, church, an hour to browse the book store aisles followed by an hour on the couch with one of my seventeen purchases, a mid-afternoon movie, grilling outdoors with all of my friend around, and a fireworks show to cap off the night.

(Unfortunately none of this will happen today.)

Old Friends, New Links

Over in the Community section I added links to blogs from two old friends from Texas, Bethe and Jackie.  And by "old" I should probably stipulate that we've been friends for a long time, and that I in no way meant to imply that either of them is nearing the "elderly" category.  Nope, young ladies both.

Ok, I'm going to stop talking.......now.

I Heart My Job

Have I mentioned lately how much I dig my job?  I say this in all honesty....no sarcasm, no saying-the-opposite-of-what-I-mean in a roundabout way.  I've told several people over the last few weeks that I have one of the best jobs in the bank, and I really believe that I do.

I love the training aspect.  Showing our new employees how to do the ins and outs of every day teller work and account maintenance, setting up the new branches, balancing the side projects I've been assigned with preparing the branch for its Grand Opening...it's an ever-evolving, never-ending challenge set of challenges.  And that's when I'm not being interrupted by my cell phone, with employees or teammates from five different states calling with a question.  My job never gets boring, I'm on a team full of awesome people, and the upper management we report to is supportive and great to work for.  All things considered, it's a really good gig.

Case in point, yesterday (day off) I was up at 6:00 to drive two hours and work at a short-handed branch.  We got out late, so I didn't get on the road until almost 8:30 pm.  I spent half of my drive home on a conference call, then spent another half hour texting / returning calls.  About half of those were bank folks.  I got in after 11:00 pm and fell asleep to the All-Star Game.  I woke up today excited and ready to get back to work, where I was scheduled off at 5:30 but stayed until 7:00 to work on another little side project (full disclosure: I slept in and got to work around 11:00).

So the next time I start an entry with the oh-so-original "I've been SO BUSY at work this week..." excuse, it's more than likely been a good kind of busy.  An exhausting but well worth the energy spent kind of busy.  A busy that I'm proud of and happy to have. 

So yeah, I don't always complain about work.  I usually love it out here.

Things To Do In Utica On Your Day Off

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Good thing I'm going to work tomorrow.  I'd go crazy if I had to spend two straight days in this hotel room.